A black page in Russian poetry...

The summer of 1921 in Soviet Petrograd was marked by three prominent deaths: the slow decline and death of poet Aleksandr Blok on August 7, 1921; the arrest (on August third) and execution (on August twenty-fourth) of the poet Nikolai Gumilev by the Soviet secret police; and the suicide of the writer Fyodor Sologub’s wife, Anastasia Chebotaryovskaya, who drowned herself in the Neva in despair over the vacillation of the Soviet authorities in issuing her and Sologub emigration visas.

These three deaths—the first, an early but (more or less) natural death, the second a political murder, and the third a suicide—worked together in the public imagination to form a larger conception of a cultural moment: the Petersburg/Petrograd of 1921. Several decades later, the writer Nina Berberova, a young and relatively unknown figure at the time of Blok’s death, wrote about this Petersburg summer in her memoirs, describing it in the mythological overtones which, by then, were often associated with this period: “This summer of 1921 was marked as a black page in Russian poetry; those who lived through it would never forget it […] Suddenly there was the sense of living at the edge of an abyss, into which, with incredible speed, everything that was beautiful, great, dear, irreplaceable was disappearing. With extraordinary intensity one lived through what was perceived to be the end of an era. And this spectacle had a grandiose horror, a poignant sadness, heavy with meaning.”

Yet it was most often in reminiscences about Aleksandr Blok’s death and funeral that the deaths of Gumilev and Chebotaryovskaya emerged as increasingly meaningful, coming together to create the broader formulation of the summer of 1921, which for many served as the final threshold between the old dying Petersburg and new Soviet Petrograd being born. For many of those in attendance, Blok’s funeral was the last time they would all be together. Later, many emigrated; some perished, victims of the political persecution of the time; and others survived to become the new Soviet intelligentsia.

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